The Future Of Devops Is No-code

By Author: Motivity Labs
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THE FUTURE OF DEVOPS IS NO-CODE

“Desperate times call for desperate measures”

Whether you see it as a quote from a Tom Cruise movie or a saying coined by the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates, the fact of the matter is, when you are facing an extreme situation, only an extreme measure can help you come out of that precarious moment! Well, that’s how no-code is spreading its roots today, even though its seeds were sown long back. Remember good old Microsoft Excel which was released in 1987 for Windows? It revolutionized data processing, especially in the fields of finance, accounting, and data analysis without having to write a single line of code with the help of creating macros! Microsoft Excel’s immense potential has been marred by its limited online functionality. In the early days of the Internet, in 2003, WordPress was released, an open-source content management system that allows you to build and host your websites from scratch. This can be considered one of the first no-code tools in the market. The following year 2004 saw the birth of Shopify, another no-code tool that allows businesses to prosper ...
... online by facilitating them to create and manage their online stores. Even today, both WordPress and Shopify are considered the best at building eCommerce platforms from the ground level without any prior knowledge in coding or programming. While some businesses saw the potential of these two e-commerce tools and started leveraging the benefits, some ignored them, some hesitated, and some dilly-dallied. Then desperate times hit every business on the planet in the form of Covid-19. While every business has suffered during the pandemic, the ones with only “on-premise, brick and mortar” businesses and no online presence have suffered the most. Suddenly, every business wants to have an online presence to conduct their business alongside on-premise. As there is no time to lose, these businesses took an extreme and readily available safe measure of building their online business through no-code tools and platforms. What appeared to be a slow growth till then for these no-code tools, the pandemic has helped them with the gold rush as every business wants to have their presence online, in many cases, more than their offline, on-premise business! But what is this no-code thing? What does it have to do with DevOps? Let’s find out!

Many of you might have remembered constructing different things with lego pieces when you were kids. Even for some adults, it is a serious hobby! Designing an app or a website using no-code tools is similar to building a structure with lego pieces. Just like you have to have the required lego pieces to join them to build a thing, you need to have the required tools to build an app or a website using no code. No-code is an approach for developing applications that you can use for your business needs without having to write a single line of code! With the help of a user-friendly interface with drag-and-drop capabilities, you can simply assemble all the required tools onto a single canvas and your business application is ready to use. But what is the need for no-code tools in the first place? Aren’t the traditional “tried-and-tested” methods of programming and coding by software professionals safe and reliable?

The concept of designing, developing, and implementing software applications has undergone a complete overhaul with the arrival of DevOps. DevOps has united various teams working at various stages in the software development life cycle who until then, have worked independently. Better communication among different teams and integrating them working for a common goal of delivering the required software at a faster pace has gained over the traditional software development structure. Apart from bringing various isolated teams under one common goal, DevOps offered many advantages such as faster deliveries with continuous integrations and continuous deployments, scalability of the program as required, and all this with superior security. Along with its many advantages, DevOps has brought a few pieces of baggage with it. The first big issue with DevOps was the culture change. Teams that worked in silos until then have to collaborate with different teams collectively and have to learn the DevOps tools that are new to them. The teams have to let go of their traditional working practices and learn new ones to be a part of the DevOps team. All this shift from their usual working environment and culture into a new territory has been too overwhelming. Another major problem the businesses are facing is finding proficient people to fuel their DevOps teams. There is a huge shortage of the right personnel in the areas of web designing, mobile, and platform-independent apps. This is where the no-code tools come in handy to businesses, especially SMBs. Small and medium businesses SMBs, are finding it extremely difficult to recruit proper personnel for their DevOps owing to both resource constraints and also the high cost incurred in recruiting them. The best way to handle this is to train the existing personnel in using the no-code tools. Most of today’s younger generation know how to use a computer with basic knowledge of how things work on it. When properly trained, these unskilled ordinary employees with no programming development skills can become “citizen developers” and help the business in building the software required. Organizations need not waste their time and money looking look for expensive developers and instead, make use of their existing workforce and integrate them with no-code DevOps operations.

Using no-code for DevOps can benefit in more ways than the ones mentioned above. In a traditional DevOps lifecycle, testing and security are the phases that are usually time-consuming. The development team has to test the functionality of their coding and also look at the security aspects of it. With a no-code approach, the functionality of the module has already been tested and security is built-in by the vendor who sells the no-code tools. This can save a lot of time and businesses can deploy their app versions quickly to the market so that the end-users can enjoy more functionality, more frequently! More and more businesses are embracing this no-code approach as the app development time is significantly reduced to as much as 80 – 90%!

Does the no-code revolution cause developers to go out of jobs? Certainly not! The developers will always sustain their demand. The no-code approach just eases some of the burdens off their shoulders and they can optimize their time and energy in other areas such as integration and deliveries. Also, even for a no-code, someone has to write the code somewhere and pack it into a tool. No matter what type of no-code tool one uses, some developer somewhere has to work on it. Also, even though no-code tools can produce entirely operational apps, sometimes a little coding is required for specific circumstances. Low code is required for tweaking a no-code app to a custom requirement, integrating it with other apps, and the like. In such cases, developers’ expertise and help would be required. Developers will always have their demand intact. As for the future of DevOps, not only DevOps but the future of coding too would be, NO-CODE!

For good or bad, the world at present has plunged into desperate times and everyone and everything is rushing somewhere all the time! Right from instant coffee, and instant pancake batter to the readymade walls for building construction, everything in the present day has to be instant, ready-made, and has to be delivered urgently. But one thing is sure, desperate times or not, when a product or tool is available that would make your life easier, happier, and would save a lot of time without any negative repercussions, isn’t it wise to go for it?